While organizing the 15k markdown notes that I recently imported into Obsidian, I noticed that Finder show the “Kind” for “.md” extension files as “E-Book” , which is definitely wrong.
I did a few google searches and I didn’t find a useful answer among the results, most of which were from 2008 and 2011 time frame. Many mentioned editing the associated application’s Info.plist file, but I have serveral markdown editors installed, so would I have to edit the Info.plist for every application capable of editing markdown files? That seems a bit intense to me.
Is there practical way for the end user to change the “kind” that Finder associates with the “md” file extension?
Recently noticed that Finder on my desktop Mac had Xcode as the default program associated with .md!
In the Finder, select a Markdown (.md) file, then right click and choose Get Info (or press cmd-i).
In the dialogue you’ll see’ll a panel name ‘Open With’. Expand this if it’s closed, and you’ll get a dropdown box which you can point to the app you want to use as the default. The most likely candidates are offered as suggestion, but if it’s not there, click on ‘Other’ and search for the app you want in the Finder dialogue.
Then tick the box saying ‘use this application to open all files like this’.
That’s it – it only takes a couple of seconds to do and a few seconds more for MacOS to update the associations for all your Markdown files. (BTW, this has been the standard way to do it for many years - I don’t know why people are suggesting editing .plist files…)
HTH.
2 Likes
I already set open with . That had no affect on the kind associated with the extension.
Don’t feel bad. In my searches, I found that people conflate the 2 quite often. They are distinct from one another.
Whoa! It isn’t a big deal in many cases. I do use kind for sorting and searching in Finder . I also use it for Hazel rules
Okay, I won’t…
I wonder about how the association got changed in the first place. It’s seems at least possible that it was changed by some ebook reader you’ve installed at some point. What happens when you delete that app?
This might help answer your question: Uniform Type Identifiers
FWIW, *.md files show as kind “Plain Text” on my mac.
Not my question – the OP’s. He needs to know which app changed the associations. Something obviously has as it’s not default behaviour so that seems a good step towards finding a solution.
FWIW, .md files register as Markdown files for me.
